I stayed up to date on ai and machine learning, including language models. I remember hearing that one learned math from language and wondering where things will go. I watched ai safety videos before they felt relevant. Then I heard Openai, which had a good rep at the time, is releasing their new model online, called ChatGPT. Having played with DungeonAI and NovelAI before I was gonna fiddle with this as well.
Then headlines broke, it became a phenomenon. Even then I figured this would be this week’s Thing before getting bored, as was common with these ai.
Down the line I remembered hearing ChatGPT on a gas station ad for some travel app. That was when I realized this is permanent. People who aren’t even online are likely hearing about this. Suddenly my niche hobby and hopeful dreams of the future became an actual enshittified crisis.
I don’t think I need to explain how everyone using language models now is just god awful for everyone. And the attention hasn’t gotten us closer to answering long standing questions of ethics, economic change, what is intelligence or consciousness. We’ve just got a bunch of the lowest common denominator shouting their answers now.
I miss when it was just goofy proof of concept s*** like seth bling teaching a neural network to play Super Mario Bros.
Or there was this site called “Thisgirldoesnotexist” with several sister sites like this cat does not exist and so on and it would pretty much just generate a headshot of a character. Extremely primitive versions of the image generation technology seen today. But now it’s basically just used to s*** out copious amounts of image files with no purpose and no soul.
I am an avid collector and drinker of Chinese teas, particularly oolongs and puerh. I had been drinking them for years when suddenly the absolute asshole Dr. Oz went on TV claiming that puerh tea was some magical cure for anything and everything that you might have.
Normally, I get excited for new people to share tea with, but this fad caused prices to rise across the board and caused the market to get flooded with awful quality tea. These people were drinking some of the worst quality (fishy, shou/cooked puerh) teas and were more obsessed with how to mask the flavors with milk and sugar than actually slowing down and enjoying the tea.
The fad faded and people went back to putting matcha in their morning milkshakes. Even so, I still run into people that reflexively associate incredible tea with Dr. Oz and the disgusting teas he foisted upon his audience. Sad.
Not to that extent, but crypto. I think its an amazing and really interesting technology. But now it’s tainted by scammers and when people hear the term, they get defensive because they are ready for you to scam them
Feels bad man
Ive learned a bit off a on about crypto, but never got “into it”. When I first started learning it looked like a really interesting concept with a lot of potential uses.
I can’t remember the details at this point, but when looking at bitcoin I remember seeing so many problems. There was the transaction price, speed, and complexity. There was the insanity of all the wasted energy to “mine” bitcoin. Most importantly, it didn’t make sense to me as a currency. Currency needs to be stable, easy to exchange, and easy to use to buy things. Bitcoin always seemed like a really cool prototype that needed a successor or major revisions.
Then the masses (and braindead hype bros and “visionary” corporate types) jumped on it and turned it into the shit show it is today. When people would get excited about it (“price is going up! Gotta buy now!”), it was clear they either didn’t really know what it was or were trying to hype it to get more money pumped into it. When friends or family brought it up, I’d point out that it didn’t really have any use except as speculation. I’d tell them they if they wanted to gamble, go for it, but they should realize that it doesn’t have intrinsic value (just like all the other currencies) and, as it stands, it’s a really shitty currency. Know that people aren’t buying it because it works well. People are buying it because the price is going up.
People have made a lot of money (or theoretical money if they’re still holding), but it still doesn’t seem like it actually gets used for anything but speculation. The $2+ trillion USD market cap for bitcoin makes my head spin. I’ve always thought that bitcoin was a dead end and would eventually be dethroned by something more viable, but here we still are.
I haven’t looked at cryptocurrencies in a while. Any notable progress in the last 5 or so years toward it being more than a money making gamble?
Bitcoin hasn’t made much progress. There are some layers on top of it that let you send instantly and cheaply, but they are at best impractical (for lightning, of you want to be able to receive money you have to create a channel with a “server” node and them spend bitcoin which buy you liquidity to receive money. Utterly worthless)
The two I have my sights right now are monero and ltc. Both of those let you send pretty fast and with less than a cent fee
There is a tech that is called proof of stake that means that mining is waaaay more energy efficient but none of those are implementing it. I’ve heard it has drawbacks but I’m not sure I understand them
Also monero is mined in a way that buying GPUs or ASIC (mining specialized hardware) is not worth it. You get better results on a CPU, making mining more accessible for everyone
Both of those have confidential transactions so no one know who sends who how much money nor how much money each part has. Which is pretty cool
It’s called Monero, aka XMR. Typo there.
I know what i said
/s
~I’ll edit now~
Tabletop RPG. It used to be a niche of the internet in the early days, with people posting here and there their scenarios, campaign, ideas etc. It was hard to find and so pleasurable when you found something.
Nowadays it’s trusted by … Wizard if the coast ? Online only platforms and what have you.
I loved #scenariotheque, but now it’s almost a ghost website (pardon the french).
I know if sounds like old man yell at clouds, but damn do I miss the early days.
I feel with you but I think it also brought some benefits. Finding time to meet up with my friends has become harder and harder with everyone growing up, studying, getting jobs.
The influx of people during covid catapulted the virtual tabletop solutions ahead and now we regularly play again using foundry vtt since everyone can just sit at home.
But yeah, online everyone just talks about DnD or Critical Roll it feels like and unless you’re on reddit there’s very few communities left.
Star Wars
This happened to all the ols school Star Wars fans. Disney created the “idiot fans”
All of the more recent Star Wars slop has made me realize that the original films aren’t really that good either.
Bite your tongue. Like a lot of things from the past, they need to be viewed in context
I mean they are objectively poor in a lot of ways, but you’re spot on. At the time they were fricking mind blowing. Space opera/space cowboys on the big screen! Before that we had what? 2001 and star trek?
Yeah any decent sci-fi before Star Wars was heady with little action. Logans Run, Silent Running. Also in my mind I saw sequels in general change from shameless cash grab to better attempts
I keep getting people telling me they won’t watch Andor because of the other slop and it makes me sad
thats me rn
Do watch Andor. It’s not just good Star Wars, it’s ‘good TV’ in general. And I say that as someone who hates modern Star Wars with a passion. Andor’s excellent.
Yup. Was a huge fan of the EU books and lore. Wanted to give Disney a chance, so I saw the first few movies. It was like seeing your ex at the club but she’d gone through massive amounts of plastic surgery and they’d removed all the unique features that attracted you originally. Haven’t watched anything Star Wars since the second movie in the new trilogy, literally 0 desire to see the conclusion or any new Star wars content.
Yea, Disney swore off all of the EU books stating they had no place in Star Wars. Then they started stealing portions of the EU books and basically making bad fanatic versions of them.
I thought the force awakens was pretty decent. I mean it’s literally just a new hope redux.
It wasn’t a bad movie, the characters were just incredibly forgettable. Rogue One was a good standalone movie, but it was kinda bittersweet because they stole part of Kyle Katarn’s backstory and he was always one of my favorite characters.
Old school Star Wars fans harassed the actor who played jar jar to the point that he considered suicide…
My ex wife and I used to take a chess board everywhere, play in cafes, parks, restaurants, pubs. It was something to do when we had run out of stuff to say to each other. It was a conversation starter, people would come up and have a sticky, or ask us who’s winning. Some people would occasionally ask if they can play. It was nice. Until Queens Gambit was all the rage. Then people seemed to assume we were just following that trend, and there was a noticeable increase in people saying “Queens Gambit eh?” And we stopped taking the board out so much.
Goddamnit yes. It’s why I’m very pro-gatekeeping. Because people who are new to a hobby because it got popular tend to ruin every-fucking-thing.
For example: flight simulator. That used to be an exclusively nerd domain up until the FS2020 version, which was released on Xbox. The result: a massive influx of new garbage payware and a decline in quality of established brands. While also making the sim worse in order to chase broader appeal. It’s gotten a bit better after covid went away and the normies dropped the hobby, thankfully.
Also: film photography. The popularity of instagram and YouTube ‘influencers’ got a lot of people into our hobby the past decade. It’s lead to increased gear prices, film being more difficult to get and the forums flooding with the dumbest possible questions, since these newcomers are allergic as fuck to reading manuals or watching any tutorial longer than thirty seconds. It’s also lead camera manufacturers to chase this new demographic by making their cameras shittier and more ‘instagram-friendly’. Here’s looking at you, Fujifilm and your shitty X-half.
Take it from someone who’s been around a bit: if you like a thing, keep newcomers away from it. Gatekeep it like the Berlin Fucking Wall, lest they completely fuck up your hobby.
While not to the same degree as a lot of folks, Fallout got into it some time around New Vegas because it was featured on game fly. Anyways delved headfirst into it and fell in love with the classic games. The post Fallout 4 boom gives me a headache sometimes I just want to talk with old bastards and my fellow autists about Fallout without some profligate butting in cause they watch the TV show.
Russerfrushenrushen kids and their first person fallout games. All my homes know best fallout is third person isometric turn based.
Technically that includes Brotherhood of Steel, careful there that game is still actively worse than anything Bethesda has made.
Eh, I remember enjoying it, though never played it again so 🤷 possibly nostalgia. It was just not an open world or rpg.
Oh wait, I was thinking of fallout tactics. BOS was like wasteland skinned diablo right? That is, not turn based so not in my original grumpy old man comment.
Yeah it was the one with Ballz energy drink instead of nuka cola. I was just poking fun since isometric can sometimes include top down.
I was lucky enough to have played fallout 3 before new Vegas. So the series for me went from “that was fun, interesting setting” to “Wow this is genuinely amazing and feels like a living world that I’m inhabiting and interacting with.”
And then fallout 4 came out, and I was hoping that Bethesda would have learned something from New Vegas. But that was foolish, modern Bethesda doesn’t write stories, they don’t understand characters, they are a software company manufacturing a product, not a studio crafting playable stories. What narrative and story do exist, are the minimal needed to serve the gameplay loops. They make toy boxes, not experiences. Some people like that, but that’s not what I play these kinds of games for.
Going back and playing fallout 1 and 2 solidified this for me further, if Bethesda was going to learn from what made new Vegas great, they would have done so from 1 and 2 and implemented it in 3.
I haven’t even bothered to try fallout 76. I know what it is, it’s a looter shooter live service game meant to Skinner box you in to spending as much time as possible grinding up numbers and finding the best stats on rare drops. It’s not what I’m in to. I’ve accepted that.
As much as I love the fallout setting and the potential for story and world, there will never be another fallout game, just Bethesda products wearing the aesthetic. There are plenty of other great games out there that have story and gameplay working synergistically to create an experience.
Well if you want to scratch that CRPG story itch may I suggest Arcanum, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Tainted Grail, Wasteland 2 and 3, and basically all of Owlcat games except maybe Pathfinder kingmaker.
played a lot of those.
I remember VtMB particularly fondly.
Now if only VtMB2 would get out of its development hell so we could know if it’s shit or not.
I’m in the same boat with a few others here when it comes to some games like Halo and Fallout. But I feel like I’m on the brink with 2 new ones:
- Doom: I played the original when I was a kid and got bullied for it (or probably being a general nerd). 2016 and Eternal were really popular and the franchise took off; but Dark Ages feels off. I played Dark Ages for a bit, put it down, and haven’t picked it up since. I think Doom is going down the shitter, especially what they did to Mick Gordon.
- Mother Mother (a band): My SO and I love their music for how unique and interesting it is; and we went to one of their first concerts at a small venue when they came into town ~10 years ago ish? Must have been <500 people. Generally no one else liked their music we shared it with, so we kept it to ourselves. Now? We went to another one a few months ago and it was at a HUGE stadium; absolutely packed. I think one of their songs went viral on TikTok - My Daddy’s got a gun. We’re proud of what they’ve accomplished, but really hope they don’t lose their identity in trying to become even more popular.
TIL Mother Mother is popular now. Loved O My Heart back in the day
This was from the concert. Pretty packed
I was a nerdy teen in the 90/00s. There’s plenty I could be gatekeeping but the thing is… I’m not special. Nobody is. All this shit is meaningless. You don’t own any of it. Sorry it just all comes off so territorial and greedy in a way. Grosses me out.
Dune before the movie came out
The Lynch one, right?
I have several things that interested me and became popular, but I didn’t hate on the new fans. At most I sometimes missed the feeling of having this thing that was a bit obscure and in case of channels on youtube, the intimacy of interacting with the creator and other subscribers was nice. But I can’t hate on something I like becoming popular.
As for concrete examples, I do remember subbing to this small gaming channel with 9000 subs called Markiplier back in the day.
I subbed to OKI Weird Stories when he had like 600ish subs.
I subbed to Creepcast before it had any videos on it, but that one is cheating since both meatcanyon and wendigoon were already very popular. Still, it’s been a bit nuts seeing the podcast explode in popularity. I even know people irl who listen to it.
Currently I follow a small channel, also podcast format, called The Daydream Arcade that focuses on reading reddit stories, but the hosts are two friends, who bring some warmth and personality to the format which is nice. For me, I stick around becuase I really like their friendship and their personalities. I’m also a older than the both of them and feel a bit big-sister-protective of them. I want them to grow and I believe they will because they already have 4500 subs compared to the 900 they had when I found them, but also don’t like the thought of them reaching a point of popularity where the mean assholes come crawling to tear them down.
Pogs are cool little disks
Then it became a children’s verb
The new term does derive directly from the old disk game, and the disk game derives its name from a juice beverage that originated the disks as part of the caps.
Pog might be the most diversely derived words in the English language, it being an acronym of the words Pineapple, Orange and Guava. Pineapple being derived from apple which comes out of Germanic languages, orange coming out of the Dravidian languages of south India, and guava coming out of the Arawakan languages of South America. These three language families share no known common ancestry.
This happens to most things I like. I really liked JoJo’s Bizarre adventure when the anime was first coming out and I read all the manga and then when part 3 got super popular the fandom became completely insufferable to the point where I was stopped recommending the show or keeping up with any updates. I have also been really into AI/language models/machine image generation for years before ChatGPT exploded and now “being into AI” usually means “Exporting rational thought to a chatbot.” I also feel like reddit is like this.
Jojo’s was popular for a while before I got into it. I was very confused by part 1, because none of it lined up with what I was expecting from the memes and general online discourse. It was good, I liked it. Part 2 with the Pillar Men was the thing I watched that year.
Part 3 was awful. Jotaro is the worst jojo. They did my boy Joseph dirty. Hamon is much more interesting than stands. I could not force myself to finish watching part 3.
I felt the same about Stardust Crusaders but pulled through. The second half is substantially better with E34 (D’Arby the Gambler) being my favorite episode of the show.
I remember that episode, was a good episode. shame that nothing that happened in it actually mattered to the overarching plot.
yeah sorry Anon, go fuck yourself and your nazi skull flag. That shit’s the Totenkopf, what, did the new generation of chuds ruin Nazi for you? Poor fuckin’ baby.
Maybe a “Death in June” band shirt. Which makes things … well… I dunno. Probably not better.
was not familiar with them…
from their wiki - had performed at rallies for The Right to Work, Rock Against Racism, and the Anti-Nazi League. -
holy shit this is a ride
“The Totenkopf-6 is a slightly grinning skull, framed by a circle and a small 6 in the lower right corner. Death in June has, since at least the State Laughter / Holy Water 7″, used variations of the Prussian Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” symbol. Indeed, there is another explanation that has been given by Pearce, he has also stated that it symbolises “total commitment” to the group, akin to the total commitment of soldiers of the SS”
ah… getting to the shit that matters -
“The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Death in June to be white power music harboring neo-Nazi sympathies.”
yeeeaah this all fits
I was a goth in my youth and they were among the more controversial bands. They could be just edge lords or Nazis. The guys that listened to them turned out to be Nazis, so there’s that.
They could be just edge lords or Nazis.
I refuse to make a distinction anymore. If you “joke” about being a Nazi, you’re a Nazi.
I used to think the nazi edgelord stuff was kind of funny, because I found it absurd.
The idea that anyone acting like a nazi was ‘actually’ a nazi never crossed my mind, because I genuinely thought we as a species had collectively agreed that being a nazi is the closest thing to pure evil.
Oh how wrong I was.
I was in the scene at the same time and me and my friends were always making fun of neofolk bands and their fans, because its such boring music and simply copying clothing styles of the 1940s, fitting to the boring mind of a nazi
it’s certainly an interesting nuance. ty for the tip
Thanks for the important context. I’d assumed it was a pirate flag until I read your comment and then looked it up. Fuck this particular anon.
gotta call out the nazis at every turn otherwise the place will turn into a nazi bar.
that’s 4chan for you. id be less disturbed by the amount of nazis on 4chan and more by the amount of lemmings that agree with Anon on any given subject
Now, now it is only a Totenkopf if it is from a distinct region of Germany.
ah yes the death’s head valley
